Footnotes: Footsteps, Footfalls… or Just Lost in Translation?

The honoured Footnote did not always start with maleficent intentions, however; it began with the reader’s best in mind, or the translator’s, or the editor’s, or finally, the author’s.

You start with one. Just a teeny-tiny one. “This word carries untranslatable cultural context.” Then, like linguistic Pringles, you add another. And another. And another. Soon, you are stuck explaining puns, historical references, embedded idioms, obscure regional dialects, and that one line that only makes sense if the reader knows the political history of Harappan civilisation or whatever.

Of course, saying, “The ancient Greeks, the soldiers, and the common folk, were inherently ahem very close to each other,” is as important as saying, “The Spartans were brave warriors.” No one can stop us from putting a footnote, and of course, no one gets to stop us from using footnotes like our life depended on it.

Right? WRONG!

Here comes the publisher and his cronies—the editor, the typesetters, and the very readers themselves, enemies of authors, I swear. You were peacefully translating this one text that you really liked, and you wanted to let the readers feel the same joy that you felt when reading it and translating it. So what if the text went two times over the prescribed length? The emotion should be carried forth, right?

But no, the publisher will email you at 2 AM with subject lines like “Urgent: Page Count Crisis.” Typesetters curse your name, and then those ultimate bosses of apparent “correction,” the Editors, who have their hearts set on punching the life, the you-ness, from the text itself. “Move some of these to the appendix?” And you, the intellectual martyr that you are, dig your heels right in and protest: “But I need it for the contexxtttttt…”

Alas, your cries will more often than not go unheard. O Martyr, may the very footnote remember you in its footnotes.

One such martyr was Reverend John Hodgson, a 19th-century historian, who devoted one full quarto of a multivolume account to just a single gigantic footnote. A quarto is around eight pages, by the way… This information could very well have gone in the footnotes, by the way.

Now the reader, the poor soul, surrounded by this war on footnotes. Kawaiiso~ They set out to read a translation of, say, a classic Marathi powada or a Japanese haiku anthology, expecting lyrical beauty and cultural immersion. What they get instead is a totally unasked-for cardio workout for the eyes.

Spot the superscript, dip to the bottom, read the explanation, flip back, realise they’ve forgotten the original line, and then start the entire thing over. You might have wondered earlier about the use of the “by the ways” in this text. Well, here you have it, the troubles of having the footnotes as endnotes, and not as footnotes.

Both the ways have the same trouble, mind you; the only difference is that footnotes provide a lesser degree of forgetting where you were than endnotes, making them the clear winner—but that is a story for another time.

Footnotes become the translator’s diary. A space for foot-dragging honesty, for venting about untranslatable humour, for passive-aggressive apologies to both the reader and the source text.

They’re where we unpack puns that died on the operating table. For example, me using “Aflame” as a pun to the original pun “Dharmajal”… The final version I decided on was “Af-lame.” Smart, aren’t I? Now go ahead and mourn for my sense of humour, which is dead.

If the translation itself is a polished diplomatic speech, the footnote is the WhatsApp group where the translator and the group cry and rant about everything that went wrong.

Footnotes are the exact places where egos run wild. Where a translator fights against the editors, other translators, writing micro-essays on why our word choice is better than everyone else’s.

Scholarly translation notes are basically academic subtweets, except with more Latin phrases, Japanese and Marathi in my case, and way fewer emojis.

Now, with digital publishing, the footnote has taken on a new, sleeker form. Hyperlinks pop up effortlessly. Hover, click, dismiss. Instant access with minimal disruption.

But something’s missing. Gone is the visual drama of a printed page drowning in superscripts. Gone is the anarchic beauty of a book whose bottom margin looks like a neglected archaeological dig site.

The digital footnote is efficient. But it’s too well-behaved. It lacks the tactile irritation that made scanning through footnotes or flipping through endnotes an act of devotion—or masochism.

From the marginalia of medieval scribes to the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 where printers like Jugge used footnotes to dodge theological lawsuits, translation and footnotes have always been tangled in a co-dependent, slightly toxic relationship.

Even back then, footnotes were spaces of anxiety, bias, and last-minute theological backpedaling. Translation history is footnote history. One long, over-explained apology for the gap between languages.

So, in the end, what are footnotes in translation? Are they footsteps—wandering detours, unsteady tracks left by translators second-guessing themselves? Are they footfalls? Deliberate, forceful, unavoidable marks left on the reader’s path? Or are they… let’s be honest… the literary equivalent of stepping on a rake in your own backyard?

Probably all three. The truth is, translation without footnotes would be cleaner, neater, easier to read… and infinitely more dishonest.

So here’s to the footnote: half apology, half confession, and 100% proof that no translation is ever simple.

And if you’ve read this far, congratulations: you’ve just experienced what it feels like to chase a footnote halfway across a book.